During topsoil stripping for the Gas Pipeline to the West, a site emerged at the apex of a north-south gravel ridge, shaped around the arcs of a penannular ditch, which is a near-circular enclosure ditch with a deliberate break or entrance gap rather than a fully closed ring. The entrance gap measured 1.6 metres wide, and the enclosed platform it defined sat distinctly above the surrounding ground. What made the arrangement stranger still was that the ditch itself pre-dated the burials that were eventually cut into its interior and eastern arc, meaning the dead were being interred into a structure that had already been standing for several centuries.

Radiocarbon dating of material within the ditch fill placed its construction or use somewhere between AD 420 and 620, broadly the early medieval period in Ireland. Finds from that phase included a bone spindle whorl and copper-alloy chain links, small objects that suggest domestic or personal activity rather than a purely funerary function at the outset. The sixteen burials excavated there belong to a later period altogether, with dating placing the interments between the 10th and 13th centuries. The dead were a mixed group: six adults, four children, two early postnatal infants, and five neonates. There was little consistency in how they were oriented, which is itself unusual for a medieval Christian burial ground where east-west alignment was the norm. Two graves stood out further still; one was furnished with flat stones placed beside the skull in what excavators described as an earmuff arrangement, and another had a single stone placed beneath the head as a pillow. By the time these burials were being made, medieval field ditches had already incorporated the older penannular enclosure into the corner of an agricultural landscape. The site also showed traces of Middle Bronze Age activity, suggesting the ridge had been drawing human attention across several thousand years.